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Sing like Parrots

Adewale Maja-Pearce: Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 15 December 2016

Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening 
by Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
Harvill Secker, 256 pp., £14.99, November 2016, 978 1 84655 989 1
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... out long before the end of the colonial era, as modernity closed in. And what of writers like Nadine Gordimer or Mia Couto, writing only in a European language? Are we meant to dismiss them as non-Africans? Ngugi’s real objection is to the power and prestige of European languages, and the way teachers hammered them into their pupils. He also ...

Palestinianism

Adam Shatz, 6 May 2021

Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said 
by Timothy Brennan.
Bloomsbury, 437 pp., £20, March 2021, 978 1 5266 1465 0
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... Waguih Ghali’s novel about a group of doomed cosmopolitan Cairenes in the early Nasser years. As Nadine Gordimer put it, Said had finally written his novel.But he wasn’t ready to elegise the Palestinian cause, even if he had cut his ties to the leadership. Palestine was a symbol of justice denied and freedom to come, rather than a piece of bitterly ...

All That Gab

James Wolcott: The Upsides of Sontag’s Downsides, 24 October 2019

Sontag: Her Life 
by Benjamin Moser.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 241 00348 0
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... mind can become a closed circuit. In March 2004, Sontag travelled to South Africa at the behest of Nadine Gordimer. ‘Gordimer wanted to take her to a game reserve,’ Moser reports, ‘but Susan proclaimed that she was not interested in nature.’ In this Sontag had been foolishly, conceitedly consistent all her ...
... I suppose it would have been possible to write, a white woman living in Africa (as it was for Nadine Gordimer), nearer to her two first children, but it would have meant giving up a world of experience denied to her in postwar Salisbury (not having rid itself of apartheid), with its frozen middle-class attitudes to women – what they could do, and ...

Adieu, madame

Terry Castle: Sarah Bernhardt, 4 November 2010

Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt 
by Robert Gottlieb.
Yale, 233 pp., £18.99, October 2010, 978 0 300 14127 6
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... and aesthetic gulf, separated the two women. But incongruous as it sounds – a bit like imagining Nadine Gordimer clubbing, say, with Lindsay Lohan – it’s a pretty good bet that Woolf would have seen Bernhardt on stage. Unless I’ve missed it, none of the Woolf biographers reports such an encounter, but Woolf would have had dozens, if not ...

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